Reckoning ~ Indian Hill 2 ~ A Michael Talbot Adventure (40 page)

Chapter 43

Indian Hill

“What do you mean, ‘the aliens have Mike?' I knew I couldn’t trust them. I’m going to send a battalion and wipe their asses off the planet once and for all! I’ll finish off what the Germans couldn’t.” Paul was pissed, to say the least. His office looked as if a cyclone had passed through it, and in a sense, one had. One truly pissed-off cyclone.

“Sir, they didn’t hand him over; he went voluntarily.” Corporal Jackson said, trying his best to calm the colonel down.

“There’s no goddamn way he went voluntarily. I saw his eyes. Those aliens scared him.”

“Well, sir, apparently, the thought of more innocent lives dying for him scared him more.”

Paul stopped to think about that one for a moment, but it did little to slow down his tirade.

“But there’s one thing you’re forgetting, Corporal Jackson. He knows about this place.” Corporal Jackson’s face literally paled. “Yeah, do you see the dilemma now, Corporal?”

“Well, wha…What do we do now, sir, evacuate? Do you really think he’d give them this location?”

“No, I don’t think he’d willingly give this place up, but he might not have a choice. He might not even know he’s doing it. We have no way of knowing what type of interrogation tactics the aliens have. And no, we don’t evacuate. We have nowhere else to go. If they come, we stand and we fight. There is no choice in this matter. This is our best hope and this is where we’ll stand, or fall.” He added softly.

Paul sat when the corporal left to think out the events of the past couple of days. Major Salazar and some of his men came out of the tunnel and all had sustained injuries of one sort or another. Two of the more severely injured were still in the hospital with gunshot wounds and a couple of broken bones. The rest had varying degrees that would classify them as “walking wounded,” injured but not badly enough to be taken off active duty.

Major Salazar had taken a small detail down the tunnel to figure out if shutting the tunnel would have been the best overall plan for the Hill; and, if so, how would they go about it safely. They were studying some of the blueprints for that leg of the tunnel when a small band of five men came running in their direction. Even from a hundred yards off, Major Salazar saw the trepidation in those men’s eyes. They hadn’t been expecting company. The major immediately withdrew his side arm. Most of the rest of the small detail followed suit. The two that were shot had not been so quick to react, and thus, Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrought forward.

The approaching men stopped and started firing on the major’s position while the major’s men returned fire, killing one of the saboteurs instantly. Then they did something that took the major completely by surprise; they got up and started running towards him. It was like target practice, the colonel thought. Two of the men didn’t made it twenty yards before they were riddled with bullets. Another man fell when the bomb blast hit. Debris rained down and the major heard sharp cries from his men. Some had been hit by falling rocks and beams. The choking dust was thoroughly blinding. The major wanted to get his men out but was unsure which way that was.

Then the nearby sound of an M-16 report followed by the entirely too close sound of a high-velocity projectile slamming off to the right of the major’s head caused him to hasten his decision. The colonel and two of his men who hadn’t succumbed to injury fired suppression shots to keep the attacker at bay. But it was like shooting in the dark. “There’s no way he can see better than us, can he?” one of them asked. The shots were coming dangerously closer.

“Keep firing.” The major shouted over their protestations.

“Major, I can’t see anything,” one of his men replied.

“Neither can that bastard, but he’s still getting pretty close.”

The opposition shots had ceased, and the major told his men to stop shooting for fear that the noise would muffle the others’ true intentions of just slipping by through the cloak of dust. An eerie silence broke out. The support timbers groaned under the new weight load, and the major feared that if he didn’t get his men out soon, they would be added to the victims roster. With four men severely injured and only three relatively healthy, getting them out of there, while watching their six was going to be extremely difficult. Difficult times call for extreme measures. So slowly but surely, the injured men extracted themselves from the damage, breathing a little easier as they went, but remaining vigilant.

Nothing was ever seen of the lone gunman again. He never surfaced at either end, and when the tunnel collapsed two hours later, he never would. The major was just emerging from the tunnel when the second blast hit. From what he could tell, the blast was more than halfway across the compound.

“Major!” came a very disoriented
voice. “I request that you and your men drop your firearms.”

“Don’t you see I have wounded here!” the major barked.

“Sir, my orders are to disarm everyone that comes through the exit.”

The major seethed but fighting with these guards could cost him the lives of more of his men, and his pride was not worth it.

“Fine. Get my men to the infirmary and take me to the colonel.” The guard’s stance softened a bit when he realized there would be no fighting.

“And, Sergeant,” he added as he turned around. “There’s at least one more man still alive in there and he’s armed; the difference is, he’s dangerous.” The sergeant stiffened, realizing that maybe his day was becoming a little more eventful than it already was. The second explosion came dangerously close to the Hill’s ammunition banks. If that had ignited, the aliens would have had to award the rebels a gold star for helping them. As it was, the ammunition bunker was a closely guarded area with armory troops hand-picked by Paul. They had been there since the beginning and comprised the elite of the military force.

The renegades assumed a charge placed close enough would do the trick but Paul had planned well. The bunker was re-bar, reinforced concrete. It was the type of concrete-reinforced structure that military units throughout the world used; and no small C-4 explosive device was going to penetrate that tough skin.

Two men, who were seen running from the vicinity moments before the blast were rounded up and persuaded to talk. It was amazing what a tooth extraction without anesthesia can do to a grown man’s philosophy on life. They sang like freed canaries.

Within minutes, twenty or so dissidents were rounded up who were also convinced to talk, albeit with less brute force. One look at their comrades’ bloody mouths and they gave up everything. All in all, they captured somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty hardcore rebels.

The majority of them started running for their freedom with the initial bomb blast. Most of those, however, had also been taken captive while some died in the ensuing gun battles. At least five survived to escape. Paul had troops out looking for them, he had to admit, if only to himself, that if they hadn’t been found by now, the likelihood of them being caught later was next to nil.

Chapter 44

Somewhere in Space

Most semblances of broadcast radio, and television, especially, were in shambles. An occasional local station was still up and running. Most of them were only on to broadcast the safest places to go for shelter or where there was a possibility of getting fresh bread. The stations, that were still operational, were guarded like fortresses.

During the early days of the invasion, many of the stations had been overrun with doomsayers and throngs of people who wanted to have their fifteen minutes of fame. Who could blame them when they only thought they had an hour left? Why not be a celebrity for one quarter of it? On this fateful night, ratings were about to take a huge leap. The aliens had beamed a signal to every functioning station on the planet, radio and television alike.

“Hu-mans!” the alien voice began. “We have an event unlike any other ever viewed in your lifetimes. One week from tonight, your champion, Mike Talbot.” At this point in my illustrious career, the vast majority of the planet’s population had no clue whom I was. The aliens must have assumed I had paraded around the world, telling everyone of my exploits. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth.

The military, from the beginning, wanted to keep the story as quiet as possible. Even if they hadn’t, I had no desire whatsoever to keep reliving the events of those eighteen months. The droning voice continued.

“…will face another of your own, Durgan O’Shea, in a fight to the death. The winner will be crowned champion of the Earth gladiator games. He will then have the honor and privilege to fight, also to the death, the Genogerian champion, Drababan.”

At this point, all of our faces were shown on the screen. Although I wasn’t actually there to witness it, I can tell you that every person who saw that broadcast had all the color drain out of their faces in an instant. Sure, Durgan looked insane and I looked scared, but it was Drababan's mug that had everyone captivated. Most people had yet to see the species that was wreaking so much havoc on the planet, but there he was.

He wasn’t skinny with big black eyes and long slender fingers like most of the earlier “abductees” claimed. He was immense, intelligent and fucking scary looking. The snout was smaller than today’s traditional crocodile, but the teeth looked every bit as nasty.

“The winner of this match, if human…” The pause on “if human” was purposeful. The aliens had no illusions that their champion would lose. Only once, on the hundreds of planets they ransacked, had the local champion beaten the Genogerian champion. That was the Stryver’s, Andible Louter. The Progerians hadn’t taken too kindly to that loss and retaliated by wiping out the entire bloodline of the offending Genogerian, making future losses that much less, palatable.

“…will simply be set free.” The message was repeated that way for two hours every day, basically just a recording that played over and over.  Eventually, anyone who had not heard about it electronically learned by word of mouth. It could have been the biggest pay per view event ever in human history, but Don King was already presumed dead and now there wasn’t a promoter big enough to take on the event.

***

Beth had dozed off when fate, divine intervention, coincidence, whatever you want to call it stepped in. The truck hit an enormous pothole, shaking the cab to its core. Beth was startled to alertness, but the swaying of the cab knocked her knee into the old Delco stock radio, roaring it into life. Beth’s first instinct was to hit the power button before the obnoxious blare of static came on. She and Deb had tried unsuccessfully throughout their ride across the states to find something on the airwaves, but each time, they were only rewarded with the sound of the crackling paper, as they came to affectionately call it. They simply quit trying when they hit Pennsylvania, and hadn’t turned it on since. Before Beth could get to the dial, she caught something about being “set free.”

“Did you hear that?” She sat up straight and looked over at the sergeant trying to gauge whether she had just hallucinated or actually heard right.

“Yeah, I heard something. I didn’t really catch it though.” The sergeant was excited also. His unit had been monitoring everything since the attacks began. The most they ever got was the occasional ham operator fishing to see if anybody else was still out there.

“This message will repeat in five minutes,” the radio blared as Beth cranked the volume to maximum in an attempt to wring out more from it. She hastily turned it back down, but not too far; she didn’t want to miss a word. She was almost giddy with excitement and had no idea how she was going to make the next five minutes pass, she thought conversation might help.

“Do you think it’s a message from the government telling us the aliens have left? That would be so wonderful,” she continued as she clasped her hands together. “I mean, could it be true? Could we all be free?”

“Hold on, Beth! What exactly did you hear?” The sergeant asked cautiously.

“All I heard was something about being ‘set free’.” The excitement in her voice was palpable. The sergeant wanted to catch the fever also, but he was a little more skeptical, not because he didn’t want to believe, he just didn’t want to believe before he was sure it was true. Utter disappointment was a little more pain than he was prepared to deal with at the moment. What if everything he had done in the last few days was unnecessary? How could he tell his wife and child? His parents? What would he tell his men?